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Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead

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Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead

#261

Post by craigyk »

api wrote: post #25
donw wrote: post #18

Few people remember it, but the same thing happened at HP. It used to be that HP engineers were expressly given Friday afternoons and full access to company resources to just play with new ideas. Among other things, this led to HP owning the printer market. Then "professional" management came in and killed the proverbial goose. They had to focus more on the "bottom line". To do what was easy to measure and track, rat…

It boggles my mind, given the big money involved, why so many people continue to bet huge sums of cash on the proven short-term penny-wise/pound-foolish idiocy of MBA-think. I mean sure-- if your company is under cash flow pressure you have to pinch pennies. You have no choice. Spreadsheet says so, and spreadsheet's the boss. But if you're not, you should be investing and thinking long term cause the other guys proba…

MBAs are just trained to optimize around the the current maximum in the "energy" landscape. These maxima are all too often not the best in the landscape, or even worse, can vanish over time as the landscape changes.

MBAs are like a gradient optimization algorithm without any simulated annealing process.

Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead

#262

Post by BillyMaize »

api wrote: post #242
DigitalJack wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" I went to a po-dunk Midwestern state school" You went to Mizzou too?

Worse. The University of Cincinnati.

Ouch! UC Comp Sci graduate here, whats wrong with UC?

Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead

#263

Post by humanrebar »

api wrote: post #126
toyg wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They might have, and it might have told them it was the right thing to do. When I was in the Valley a few years ago, lots of people were quite convinced that top talent had already been completely chained to Google/Facebook/Twitter anyway, and there was no chance of poaching it away. If you follow that line of reasoning, there is no point investing in recruitment, at least locally.

Google is expanding quite a bit in Pittsburgh, New York, and a few other locations. I wonder if this is why? I also wonder though if the real estate hyperinflation of the valley is a factor. It negatively impacts the ability to attract out of town talent when a "starter home" is one million dollars and a decent apartment is over $3000/month. It also impacts retention. I meet a lot of folks from the Valley and SF who…

Expanding in New York because of real estate prices in Silicon Valley? That sounds nutty, but maybe I'm missing something.

Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead

#264

Post by morgante »

So we can effectively say goodbye to a strong engineering culture at Google. With layers and layers of PMs, the best and brightest have no desire to entire their system. So Google's left with the academically talented individuals who don't have much initiative or drive outside of extremely narrow scopes. (So, innovation was killed by the bottom line.)

Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead

#265

Post by jgoewert »

mindcrime wrote: post #179
Spooky23 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a management perspective, you're forgetting about the obvious: the less than productive people. The benefit of giving employees no- or few-strings attached time to work on whatever is clear. Things like GMail, Apple 1, etc. The "cost" is that people are doing things that don't necessarily contribute to the bottom line -- for every GMail, there are 1,000 low-impact ideas. When your ability to make money hand over…

When your ability to make money hand over fist starts to get challenged, it is difficult to continue giving people free reign, especially when your competitors focus on cost, cost, cost. That kind of thinking sounds like it would lead to a "race to the bottom" to me. If everybody is obsessing over - and competing on - a quest to cut costs the most and the fastest, I really don't see how anybody is going to benefit fr…

Kind of a strange point on cost cutting, but how does this fall into the arguement of "paying for talent" when hiring your executive level vs "race to the bottom" point of view for your employees? I've seen this vomitous 180 flip of statement coming from the same company in a short timespan.

The top gets paid an exponential figure for 'talent', but is ignored in any cost cutting measure... yet, any purely non financial 'talent' sets you on a crash course race towards minimum wage of "Oh, you did awesome this year, but times are lean.. here is a 2% raise."

Maybe I am more irked now because the company I work for just got bought by a huge company and R&D staff was slashed in half and "No more research." became a mandate

Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead

#266

Post by RyanZAG »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #240
RyanZAG wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's the MBA degree itself that causes this. Most MBA programs go very heavily into the idea of culture and competitive advantage - and obviously stopping a core part of your culture like the 20% time would be against what most MBAs are taught. This problem has nothing to do with education and everything to do with short term professional management that is compensated based on short term results. If yo…

>If you want to blame anyone, you need to blame current financial thinking by most board of directors. I don't have an MBA, but my understanding is that this is what MBA programs teach, and is at least partly to blame for Wall St's, and boards of directors, short-term, bottom-line, quarterly focus. There are some people in the MBA world trying to correct that, one of which I know of are the Throughput Accounting [1]…

Not at all - MBAs teach company management and company finance. There really isn't anything in an MBA that would have anything to do with the job of corporate oversight that a board of directors handles.

The board of directors are simply large shareholders who are put there to make sure management does what is in the best interests of share holders. In most large companies, these people are mostly made up of employees of pension funds and similar institutions. Their job is to try their best to make sure the company is committed to giving their investors a return of x% and are usually there because it is conventional thinking that having control of a company is in your best interests.

Now obviously these guys have no idea what should be going on in a technology (or just about any other) company. They aren't really concerned with employees or anything like that - only with a few accounting and market figures such as return on equity, share price, potential acquisitions of other companies they have invested in, and whether or not to sell the company to others. Actually running the company or how the company works is the furthest thing from their minds.

Now, as I said above, these guys are not actually to blame. They are just doing their jobs - giving returns to the guys who have dumped money into their funds. The people ultimately to blame are you and me. We put our money in these massive pension funds and similar. We don't even care where the money goes. Each year we check our statements and say 'oh, 13% returns only, maybe I should switch pension funds?'.

As always, the problem is apathy, entitlement and 'well these guys are a big company, they must know what they are doing'.

Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead

#267

Post by samatman »

DigitalJack wrote: post #160
samatman wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Metaphor is not reality, but that metaphor is terrible. I'm an archer: you want as many arrows as fit in the quiver, and as far as more wood, well, we've switched to carbon fiber shafts for a reason. When you shoot an arrow, velocity gets you to your target, and velocity penetrates it too. Extra weight is a literal drag.

Go the other way. You could have 500 arrows made with toothpicks or 5 traditionals.

Our modern "arrow" is essentially a field point expelled via explosion at incredible velocity.

It's a bad metaphor.

Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead

#268

Post by jmduke »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #245
vitobcn wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't see the need to stereotype, and even less to call names. Personally, I have worked as a software developer, and I do also have an MBA, and I strongly believe that my broad/diverse education allows me to better interface with people from different backgrounds within a work environment. Are there ways to obtain broad skills (technical, management, etc.) which are more time effective, cost effective, etc.…

>allows me to better interface with people from different backgrounds within a work environment. Personally, I like to relate to people, rather than interface with them.

"Personally, I like to understand problems, rather than grok them."

Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead

#269

Post by api »

BillyMaize wrote: post #262
api wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worse. The University of Cincinnati.

Ouch! UC Comp Sci graduate here, whats wrong with UC?

Nothing. It was great, and the profs were excellent. But it's not on the coasts so it might as well be from somewhere that ends in -stan. :)
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